Swimming Towards the Surface

As some of you few may know, I had back surgery a little over a week ago, and that's why there've been no posts for awhile.  The recovery is going well, and I"m not as spaced out by the pain relief drugs as I was at first, so I'll be easing my way back into a life on the Web as well as in the Real World starting about now.

I'd like to thank Eva for taking care of me (and the dogs) so well and so carefully; I quite literally could not have done it without her.

More Poetry in Stock Than Ever Before!

I have finally gathered all my poems from the archives of Making Light and put them onto my own web site, The Den of SpeakerToManagers, on the Miscellaneous Sonnets and Other Poems page.  As the title implies, they're mostly sonnets, with a couple of villanelles thrown in for good measure.  The poems are in chronological order of writing, the oldest at the top of the page.  I hope you enjoy reading them.

ETA: I'll be fixing up the typography and the layout of the poems in the near future, but the content will remain the same.

Arise Ye Prisoners of Starvation

The other day I watched "Capitalism: A Love Story" for the first time (we don't go to the movie theater but once or twice a year, so we have to wait for things to be put on cable), and was blown away by the trailing title song: a jazz version of The Internationale (in English). Listen for yourself:

Back for a Bit

This blog has been very quiet the last few weeks.  One of the reasons is that Eva has been going through a course of radiation therapy for the last 6 or 7 weeks; that's kept me busy driving her to the hospital every day, plus doing the chores that she hasn't been able to do because of the fatigue the therapy causes.  In addition, I've had some medical appointments of my own, as I try to figure out what to do about my back.  But now Eva's therapy is done, and I've come close to having some resolution on my own case, so I expect to be writing more, at least for the next few weeks.

More details on both Eva's and my medical adventures below the fold.

The End of the World Cup Game

Really, you had to be there.

Whose Case Is It Anyway?

Well, now I know why the doctors I've been seeing about my spine haven't been giving me advice on how to manage my problems.  Seems that the neurologist now considers herself to be operating solely in an advisory capacity to the neurosurgeon, but she didn't mention that to me.  Also the surgeon moved his practice from Providence St. Vincent Hospital to Legacy Meridian Hospital (different health systems and provider networks, of course), and that's the first I've heard of that, also.  So it looks like I've fallen through the cracks.  Time will tell, we've got messages in to the surgeon's new office asking what my status really is.

Oh, and quite by accident, this won't affect my health insurance situation.  If I were staying on COBRA it would, since that coverage makes Providence a preferred provider network; anything done at Legacy costs me an extra 20% of the invoiced amount (which has been a problem because the neurologist is at Legacy Meridian).  But as of the beginning of this month my COBRA coverage has expired (thanks, Congress), and I'm going on the Oregon Medical Insurance Pool.  Coverage won't lapse, but I have to wait for the paperwork to be done and my coverage info sent to me before I can get it to the providers.  I believe the OMIP coverage will be the same for both providers (at least I hope it will; Providence is more convenient for a lot of things, and I like the hospital itself better).

It's interesting to compare this situation with the therapy Eva is getting for breast cancer prophylaxis.  There is a single person who is her case worker whose job it is to coordinate therapies and doctors, and to make sure that she knows what's going on, and that everyone is singing from the same page of the score.  And all the health professionals go to great lengths to keep it that way.  I think everybody should have a case worker, for all health concerns.  I did a rough back of the envelope calculation: Eva's caseworker says she's carrying 300 active cases; for everybody to get one (and assuming an entire family gets the same caseworker, which makes sense to me) means we'd need considerably fewer than a million caseworkers nationwide.  I bet we could train that many of the currently-unemployed to do the job in less than a year.

Undead on the Scene

You really have to love Portland.  It's not just that this is where silly things like the following happen, it's also where the police are cool with it.

After the jump: "Zombies" crash on I-84 near Lloyd exit

Hot Today

It's hot today (94 ℉ at 5PM) and the upstairs floor of our house, not being air-conditioned, is uninhabitable.  The downstairs floor is set into a hillside, so conduction into the dirt and rock keeps us reasonably cool unless we have a heat wave where it never gets cold enough at night for the air to cool down again.  So right now my office, which is downstairs, is in the mid-70s.  There's a portable airconditioner in the TV room, where we eat dinner most nights, that's holding that room at about 72 ℉.  So the only uncomfortable part of the day (aside from having to go out, of course), is making dinner.  I tend to keep that simple and fast.

The one thing I can't figure out is why the dogs like to lie around in the heat upstairs so much.

A Bit of FanFic

Last month John Scalzi and Wil Wheaten started a contest for the readers of their blogs write a piece of fan fiction no longer than 2,000 words based on an illustration of a fantasy battle between the two of them. I entered a piece, and it was a lot of fun to write, so I thought I'd put it up here for you to enjoy. Like most fanfic there are a lot of in-jokes, but if you're not up on them, don't despair; the big one at the end comes from Scalzi's famed bacon-cat photo. My piece is at the Read More link below, but you should definitely look at the illustration first.

Exciting animal story for today

(at least the animal found it exciting)

I was sitting here at the computer when Eva yelled down the stairs from the living room, "There's a bird trapped in here." Eva ran down as I ran up, because as a little girl she once got a bat trapped in her hair for a minute or two, and is very averse to that ever happening again.

The bird had come in the sliding door from the deck, which is at the end of the north wall of the living room. The rest of that wall is picture windows (this is an Atomic Age split-level ranch, and the amount of light coming into the living room was one of the reasons we bought the house), and the bird tried to get out again through a window. It was trapped in the window by Spencer, our rat terrier, who wanted to either play with the bird or eat it, either of which would have been seriously bad for the bird. Either way, Spencer was trying hard to get to the bird, and the bird was frantically flying around in the window, but afraid to move away from it, so it was trapped in the casement. The bird was further confused by the fact that another bird (perhaps its mate) was flying around just outside the same window, and the trapped bird clearly wanted to join it.

There's a baker's rack with plants and some display vases next to that window, and now there was also an excited terrier trying to get to the window, so I had to spend several minutes moving things out of the way while holding the dog off. Luckily, Jemma, the Lhasa Apso wasn't quite so excited about the bird, though she did circle around that part of the room, a few feet back from the window. Eventually the combination of my persuasion and Eva's calling the dogs from downstairs got them both to leave the living room. The bird by this point was too scared even to be fluttering around in the window; it had landed in the corner of the window and stayed there.

The bird didn't seem to be going anywhere, so I looked around the room for something to catch the bird in that wouldn't hurt it or let it hurt me. I grabbed a blue felt blanket off the couch, the security blanket that we put on Spencer at night (he likes to sleep curled up in the fetal position on the couch completely covered by the blanket). I carefully surrounded the bird with the blanket and very softly closed it up so that I had my hands around the bird's body and wings. The bird didn't move; I guess it was still pretty scared. Then I carried the blanket out on the deck, held it over the railing above the back yard, and shook the blanket gently so the bird could get out. It flew straight away from me as fast as it could, apparently undamaged.

Spencer doesn't seem to have noticed any new smells on his blanket, which I'm happy about. He can wind himself up quite enough even without the smell of prey to excite him.